Conversion Rate Optimization with Rand Fishkin [Video]

You’re trying to ask a girl out. You can focus either on getting your looks right, shave, comb your hair, put your nicest cloths on, maybe even take a bath or you can focus on the whole approach thing.

Which is most likely to get you the girl?

You’re right, you need to have both aspects covered in order to make her see what a catch you are. So, why do people usually focus on the superficial part?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) begins with finding out the two whys:

1. Why haven’t people taken the initial step by signing-up for newsletters, subscribing to RSS, following you on Facebook, Twitter… basically by going for that call-to-action.

putting “free” in your call-to-action copy (“free newsletter” or “sign up for free”)

having more product / service details (add more photos, descriptions)

having product / service video (and optimize it so it’s interesting to watch)

not copying others (what works for others might not work for you)

“Full package” is what most people (girls) respond to. Conversion rate optimization is a process of becoming complete. It takes a lot of time and effort, but in the end you may even get to choose the girl you like. If you think this method can be improved, please use the comment section bellow. Any thoughts are welcome.

note: I want to use this opportunity to thank Randy Fishkin for providing us with such a great SEO material over the years. Thanks man.

No matter which industry you’re a part of, or what ever it is you’re trying to achieve true results require you to work from inside out. Unless you’re doing all you can to become best version of you (same applies to your products, of course), there’s only so much makeup and clothing can do.

Damn it, makeup and nice clothing work so well for girls. I wish websites were female, so CRO would be much easier on SEOs.

Is this a sexist observation? Hope not, all I’m trying to say is that there’s nothing wrong with clothes and makeup, but working from the inside out is more interesting and exciting as it takes you to a level you’ve never been before.

I agree with your 2 optimization focii, but I also try to test/optimize the design of my site when I go through a redesign. There are too many instances of redesigns freaking out the user base. Ahem, Digg.

Last redesign, I used a Survey Monkey to show my users the different design options that I was thinking about (I learned about using them for this kind of thing from here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/measurement-and-testing/). I think I nailed the right design because I did not have any freakouts. I also, put the design possibilities on my Facebook page to again get some validation before going live with my thoughts. Lastly I used a 1 month of subscription of http://optimizely.com to actually do some data driven CRO on the redesign.

Thanks so much for pointing out the importance of design in CRO and for mentioning Opimizely (I’ll make sure I add those guys to the list of services that might help people optimize websites for conversions).

I think it’s marvelous idea to test designs with the community you’re a part of. Could I be a part of your design validation on Facebook?